Category: Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

It’s almost my birthday here in Australia—a birthday I share, give or take a few time-zones—with an incredible Brooklyn-based sci-fi writer named Ben Fransisco.  I first met Ben at Clarion South back in 2007, where be blew me away with a series of delicate, nuanced short stories that found homes in magazines like the Realms of Fantasy, Shimmer, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Ben’s stories are extraordinary, even more so because they’re rare. Precious glimpses of an extraordinary talent which appear every couple of years, then disappear beneath the weight of Ben’s other life where he worked for high-profile non-profits advocating for LGBTQ rights and immigrant rights. He’s legitimately one of those people who changes the world for the better, which makes it really hard to begrudge his job pulling him away from writing. Hard, but not impossible. I’m an unreasonable man who always wishes his favourite writers would produce more work. Which is why the recent release of this book made me

Goodreads, as is their tradition, have curated a list of all the books I read across 2022. The total number runs to 72 books, give or take a couple of titles that didn’t log properly, with another 10 books that I started across the year still “in progress” at the end. That’s a big of a slow year for me, but more than I thought, especially given I worked full-time for the first time ever through the bulk of 2022. The learning curve—and figuring how to use my time judiciously—proved to be a challenge. With that said, lets talk the highlights. 2022 was a year where the bulk of the new-to-me authors I picked up were romance-oriented, partially because Romance is my comfort reading and partially because Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and the Hot As F$ck Romance newsletter fed a continual supply of interesting reads my way. Big recommendations on this front are Penny Reid’s WINSTON BROTHERS books, Kris Ripper’s

I often start workshops on story structure with the warning, “after this, you’ll never be able to go to the movies with non-writers again.” Lots of folks think I’m joking, but it’s essentially true: the three-act structure is the source code for an awful lot of TV and movies, and understanding its core beats means you can map out the bulk of a plot from a handful of details.  For me, this resulted in a different kind of enjoyment, more focused on teasing out the how-and-why of creative choices and where things go wrong, but there are plenty of folks who don’t enjoy that. Like, for example, my beloved spouse, who was so irritated by my response to the first three episodes of Star Trek: Next Gen that we’ve basically agreed to watch nothing Trek-related together for the sake of our marriage. They love the TV show unconditionally, and I…um…let’s say “sit there marveling at just how far TV storytelling

The first lines of text of Kathy Acker’s New York City in 1979 are short and succinct: SOME people say New York City is evil and they wouldn’t live there for all the money in the world.  These are the same people who elected Johnson, Nixon, Carter President and Koch Mayor of New York. But of course, rending it like this undoes the impact of that statement, because it’s divorced from the important context of the page. When viewed in the book itself — or, in my most recent re-read, the ebook file — that same collection of words is framed very differently by the white space around them.  I come back to this opening — this prologue — repeatedly to appreciate the heavy lifting it does within the text. The content of the text sets us up for the book that follows, but I’d argue the presentation of the text is equally important. The book starts with an immediate

We’ve been watching Doom Patrol, a television show that riffs heavily on Grant Morrison’s ground-breaking run on the comics in the late eighties and early nineties. Naturally, this sent me scurrying off to revisit Morrison’s philosophy of narrative as a hypersigil—an extension of the chaos magic philosophy of creating a glyph that codifies your intention and imbuing it with energy to effect change in the world. For Morrison, a hypersigil was an extended work of narrative that served the same purpose. Stories designed to change the self and the world. He created three works that were explicitly hypersigils—The Invisibles, Flex Mentallo, and The Filth—all of which were created during or around his Doom Parol run. Morrison is batshit insane, of course, and that’s part of his charm as a creator, but it’s interesting to watch some of his more out-there ideas get teased out by other writers. For example, the curation of a social media profile lends itself to the

David Tennant Does a Podcast is a constant source of unexpectedly good advice for artists, largely because its not a podcast attempting to deliver good advice–it’s just Tennant sitting down with a bunch of talented people and asking the questions he’d like to have answered. There’s also an interesting pattern form–every season, the best episode in terms of creative advice always seems to come from an unexpected angle. For example, season one is awash with fantastic interviews with great actors like Tina Fey, John Hamm, Olivia Coleman, and Ian McKellan, but the episode I’m most likely to re-listen to for a creative boost is inevitably the one with James Corden talking about the lesson he learned from Tom Hanks. In the current season, the best episode thus far is the interview with Cush Jumbo. The entire thing is worth it, but I honestly think the section where she talks about the dark periods of her acting life and the sheer

It’s been about five years since I last did a serious scouring of my RSS feeds, which means a lot of the regular incoming information is largely focused on topics that were of interest to me from 2010 to 2015. Things have changed since then, and the signal to noise ratio is becoming a little more unacceptable, so it’s time to start culling feeds and adding new stuff. Kathleen Jennings dropped by earlier this week and noted that she’s in the process of setting up a new RSS reader, after years of working without one, so I figured I’d create a space where folks who may be doing the same can talk up the feeds that are meaningful to them. One of mine remains Inhabitat, a blog about using design to create a better world, which is a glorious mine of story ideas and setting details. A newer site I’m adding in is SF writer Trent Jamieson’s new online space,

The great irony of Warren Ellis: The Captured Ghosts Interviews is this: it’s an interviewer with a comics writer who thinks very carefully about the design and packaging of the written product, and yet it’s released with an incredibly ugly , half-arsed cover that’s seemingly designed to discourage purchasing. Which is a pity, because the contents of the book offer some fascinating insights into Ellis’ mindset, work processes, and usage of the internet, circa 2010/2011. We live in an age where access to interviews with creators are at an all-time peak right now, what with the plethora of websites, podcasts, and livestreams devoted to archiving creative insights. What marks The Captured Ghosts Interviews as something special is it’s origins: these are the full transcripts of the interviews Meaney and Thurman did while making a documentary about Ellis and his work, which means you’re getting all the messy asides and digressions rather than the best sound-bytes. It also means they have

I’ve spent the last three days in Adelaide, doing a lightning tour of Fringe Shows and generally being the bad kind of friend who doesn’t let anyone know that I was in town. Caught a total of six shows, ate a lot of great food, and hung out with the fam. The fringe is an interesting experience when you’re a writer, because you really start seeing the difference between the “competent, polished, and dull” and the “flawed, but interesting and ambitious.” We hit one of the former in a final night, and largely walked away angry–there was nothing technically wrong with the show, but it was centred around a gimmick and had nothing at it’s heart. Strip away the gimmick and we could have had a similar experience by wandering into a pub and making requests of a decent cover band. I hit two of the latter–shows that were not good, but were interesting as heck–and my immediate response was

If you’re a reader with a KU subscription and a hankering for great fantasy, allow me to turn your attention to the MARCH KU FANTASY READS page assembled by dark fantasy author Melissa Padgett. It brings together seventy-odd titles that cover the spectrum from sword-and-sorcery, urban fantasy, romantic fantasy, epic fantasy, and more, all brought together in one place to make it easier to browse and find new books, authors, and series you might love. On my list to investigate further: PH Solomon’s Bow of Heart books, Trevor Darby’s Myth Squad books, and Padgett’s guide to sociopathic princesses. I may well be pointing Kay McLeod’s Carnelian Fox my partner’s way given it’s confluence of things they will likely love. The page is running until March 15, so check it out over yonder. Not in Kindle Unlimited (aka Netflix for Readers) and interested in finding out more? Amazon’s got you covered.